December 3-5: Ethnography about Ethnography
| ANTH 565: ETHNOGRAPHY AS SCIENCE AND LITERATURE December 3-5: Ethnography about Ethnography |
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The last week, split, reading Bamo, Harrell, and Ma's Fieldwork Connections and Richardson's Travels with Ernest, which truth be told I picked out of a catalogue and haven't read yet, but will be interested to read since it's a book something like ours. Partial readings posted include Chapters about background and America from FC, as well as The brief introduction and two travels from Travels. Both of these books are about the process of fieldwork itself, and touch on the results only through that process, with little of the analysis found in a conventional ethnography, even one like Lavie's Poetics. Dec 3: Fieldwork Connections: Writing about Ethnography Here we return to the original project of the Cliffords--writing about ethnography, rather than writing ethnography. But this is a little different, both from the Cliffords, who are writing as critics, and from Chagnon in Studying the Yanomamo, who is writing a kind of one-sided heroic autobiography. Even Lavie, with all her self-examination and divided persona (not to speak of Mickey-Mouse T-shirt) is writing from one side. Here we write from both sides of the encounter, each ethnographing the self and the other. Does it work? Is it really anything new? Do we learn from it? Dec 5: Travels with Ernest: Bridging a different divide Here we deal with a different divide, not between America and China or between subject and object, but between ethnography and something not quite similar. Reflecting back on Geertz, Clifford, and all the other ethnographies that you have evaluated this quarter as literature, post on whether you think the "sociological-literary divide" is real, if so what effect it has on our understanding of culture and society, and what it says about ethnography as science and literature. |